"If helping the poor is a crime, and fighting for freedom is rebellion, then I plead guilty as charged." --Crispin "Ka Bel" Beltran

Sunday, July 20, 2008

Pagbagsak ng ekonomiya ng Estados Unidos

Status Report on the Collapse of the U.S. Economyby Richard C. Cook*The author *is a former U.S. federal government analyst, whosecareer included service with the U.S. Civil Service Commission, theFood and Drug Administration, the Carter White House, NASA, and theU.S. Treasury Department.*

Global Research, July 16, 2008

With the economic news of the week of July 14—the continuing crisisamong mortgage lenders, the onset of bank failures, the announceddownsizing of General Motors, the slide of the Dow-Jones below11,000—we are seeing the ongoing collapse of the U.S. economy.Even the super-rich are becoming nervous as cries for an emergencysuspension of short selling ring out.

What is really taking place, however, is that the producing economy ofworking men and women is being crushed by the overall debt burden onhouseholds, businesses, and governments that could reach $70 trillionby 2010. The financial system, including mortgage giants Fannie Maeand Freddie Mac, is bankrupt, as the debts it is based on cannot berepaid.

This is because the producing economy of people who work for a livingsimply can no longer generate enough purchasing power for peopleeither to pay their debts or allow them to purchase what is being soldin the marketplace. In turn it is the debt burden and the loss ofsocietal purchasing power that are crashing the stock market. Thus thecollapse of thefinancial economy has started to destroy the producing economy as well.

It's a "perfect storm," the result of a 200-year-old financial systemwhere money is largely created by bank lending and where since 1980our industry and jobs have been increasingly outsourced abroad tocheap labor markets. Thus domestic incomes have stagnated while thenation's GDP has not been able to keep up with the exponential growthof debt.

While the mainstream media are blind, deaf, and dumb as to the causes,the victims within the middle and working classes are seeing theirlivelihoods ruined, jobs taken away, pensions eroded, homes foreclosedon, and are being saddled with ever-increasing debt and forced to workunder more and more stress due to rising burdens of taxation, gas andfood priceinflation, and bureaucratic rules and regulations. The only places amore-or-less normal life may still be possible will be the wealthiestimperial centers like Washington, New York, Houston, Chicago, or SanFrancisco.

All that the current bailouts being engineered by the Federal Reserveare doing is to create more debt to shore up failing financialinstitutions. No new wealth is being created. It's band-aids onband-aids. The problem politically is that control of the U.S. longago was turned over to the bankers and the financiers of the Westernworld. It was called financial "deregulation," accelerated underPresident Ronald Reagan, and has run amok since then.

From a longer historical view, it's the same phenomenon that firstcreated and then ruined the British Empire , and it's what created andis now ruining the American Empire today. A side-effect of control bythe bankers and financiers is that they are also Zionists, so we havethe added multi-trillion dollar burden of trying to conquer the MiddleEast on behalf of the international oil interests and the state ofIsrael.

The situation has deteriorated sharply since the 1970s as U.S. affairshave been managed on behalf of the financial interests by what youmight call the "Three Amigos"—Henry Kissinger, Paul Volcker, and AlanGreenspan. Kissinger, while Nixon's secretary of state, made the U.S.dependent on the Middle East for oil, lavished billions on Israel 'swar machine, and created the petrodollar to support our trade andfiscal deficits. Volcker, while chairman of the Federal Reserve,crashed the U.S. producing economy in the recession of 1979-1983,leading to the rise of the "service economy." Greenspan, during hisown Federal Reserve chairmanship, presided over the bubble economywhich was created through massive official fraud in home mortgagelending and is now sinking like the Titanic.

The politicians have enabled these financial crimes. Above all it'sbeen the Bush family which has served as a political Trojan Horse forthe financiers for three generations, with affairs having become muchworse since George H.W. Bush invaded Iraq for the first time in 1991.The enablers have included a majority of the members of the U.S.Congress. (See theconclusion of Patrick Buchanan's new book, Churchill, Hitler, and theUnnecessary War for an account of how the U.S. since the Bush Ipresidency has replicated the catastrophic errors of failed Britishimperialism.)

The American people are not entirely innocent. We have been so lulledto sleep by the financier-owned media that we have allowed thesedisasters to take place and are now reaping the consequences. We havebeen the fodder for their wars and the signers of their loans. We havetried to carve out our own piece of the pie which is now crumbling.What is taking place is not just the collapse of the U.S. , but morethan likely the final crash of Western civilization, since we are thelast of the world empires to go down the drain. World War I saw theend of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman empires.World War II saw the disappearance of the French, British, Japanese,and Italian empires, along with Nazi Germany. The Soviet empirecollapsed in 1991. The American is next. The danger is that we maylash out and start a nuclear World War III out of frustration and toappease the elitists of the world who see war and famine as theirpathway to world control. Such a war would also mean a militarytakeover domestically to manage the pathetically weak nation that weare becoming.

The bankers and financiers do not care if nations and empires destroythemselves and each other, because they are internationalists. Infact, the more war and mass starvation there is the better off theyfeel. All they need is a base from which to operate. London has beentheir main base of operations since the Bank of England was founded in1694, though they have a strong presence in other nations. They havebeen especially influential in northwest Europe , where elitism in theform of Freemasonry endeavored since the time of the French Revolutionto destroy the authority of the Catholic Church.

In fact, World War I was a project of the Freemasons in dismemberingGermany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, both largely Catholic. Thisdestruction allowed the masters of usury to flourish within theatheistic and materialistic culture that Freemasonry fostered acrossEurope . World War I also resulted in the virus of Communism, largelyegged on by the internationalists and Freemasons, though it had such atragic impact on Russia and Central Europe before spreading to Chinaand East Asia .

It is theoretically possible that the US as a nation could still saveitself through an internal revolution, while playing a much reducedrole in the world. After all, England , France , and Italy still existas shadows of their past greatness. But, realistically, all ordinarypeople can do today is try to survive, perhaps by working with friendsand neighbors in planting food and living within the undergroundeconomy. At least people might not then have to starve to death,because hard as it is to believe that "it could happen here,"widespread famine in the U.S. seems a real possibility over the nextseveral years.

Nations take such risks when they allow capitalist agribusiness todestroy local agriculture.On a national level, it is likely that as a response to the economiccrisis some attempt will be made by desperate politicians to try toreplicate the New Deal, but to do this effectively would requirepolitical control by a nationalistic reform party. Even then,additional reform measures such as control of credit as a publicutility, a basic income guarantee, and a nationaldividend would be needed for real economic security to replace thecurrent madness that could soon make the U.S. a relic of history.

Richard C. Cook is a former U.S. federal government analyst, whosecareer included service with the U.S. Civil Service Commission, theFood and Drug Administration, the Carter White House, NASA, and theU.S. Treasury Department. His articles on economics, politics, andspace policy have appeared on numerous websites and in Eurasia Criticmagazine. His book on monetary reform, entitled We Hold These Truths:The Hope of Monetary Reform, will be published soon by Tendril Press.He is also the author of Challenger Revealed: An Insider's Account ofHow the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the SpaceAge, called by one reviewer, "the most important spaceflight book ofthe last twenty years." His website is at www.richardccook.com.